[whatwg] Storage quota introspection and modification

[Diogo Resende]

Agree 100% (even with geolocation).

On Wed, 2010-03-10 at 07:54 -0800, Ian Fette (イアンフェッティ) wrote:
> As I talk with more application developers (both within Google and at
> large), one thing that consistently gets pointed out to me as a
> problem is the notion of the opaqueness of storage quotas in all of
> the new storage mechanisms (Local Storage, Web SQL Database, Web
> Indexed Database, the Filesystem API being worked on in DAP, etc).
> First, without being able to know how large your quota currently is
> and how much headroom you are using, it is very difficult to plan in
> an efficient manner. For instance, if you are trying to sync email, I
> think it is reasonable to ask "how much space do I have," as opposed
> to just getting halfway through an update and finding out that you hit
> your quota, rolling back the transaction, trying again with a smaller
> subset, realizing you still hit your quota, etc. 
> 
> 
> I would like to see a method added, for any "storage mechanism",
> something like "GetCurrentQuota()" and "GetCurrentQuotaUsed()". (I
> specifically don't care what they're called or the details, e.g.
> whether they need to be callbacks, I just want to see us address this
> use case.)
> 
> 
> Secondly, I think we need a better answer for obtaining a larger
> quota. Let's think for a moment about the use cases -- in most
> instances, I am going to make a decision that I want to use an
> application offline. (I personally would not expect to browse to a
> site and then just happen to be able to use it offline, nor do I
> expect users to have that expectation or experience. Rather, I expect
> going through some sort of flow like clicking something that says
> "Yes, I want to use Application X offline". At this point, I want to
> get any permissioning issues out of the way. I don't want to wait
> until the data sync to the Web XXX Database starts failing 10 minutes
> later to pop up an infobar that is no longer in the user's current
> flow / state of mind, I don't want to then pop up another infobar 30
> minutes later saying their Filesystem quota is full, etc. I want to be
> able to get this out of the way all at once, at a point in time where
> I believe the user is actually in the mindset / task of deciding that
> they want to use my web application. I specifically do not want to
> have to deal with 4 different infobars, potentially at 4 different
> points in time, to use an application I have decided I want to use.
> 
> 
> To that point, I would like to see a method added (presumably that can
> only be called in response to a user action) that would allow my page
> to request a bundle of permissions. I am going to go out on a limb
> here and include geolocation in this bundle. Some sort of a callback
> type API where I pass in a list of permissions that I want, the UA is
> free to display this to the user in whatever mechanism it determines
> appropriate (if at all -- e.g. if the user has already denied
> geolocation and that's being requested again, as a UA i might decide
> not to present that request). That is, I could pass in something like
> ["LocalStorageQuota", 20*1024*1024 /* 20M */, "WebSQLQuota",
> 1*1024*1024*1024 /* 1GB */, "FileSystemQuota", 10*1024*1024*1024 /*
> 10GB */, "Geolocation", true], and the callback could then (as a
> convenience) indicate the current quota for all of the things that I
> asked for, so that I could figure out whether the user accepted,
> denied, or accepted and modified the request and how I can then
> proceed (or not proceed). Again, I don't care terribly about the
> details of how the API looks, the above is just meant for
> illustration.
> 
> 
> -Ian